Development of behavior to be topic of 2010 Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lecture Series

The UW Department of Psychology’s fifth annual Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lecture Series will discuss the development of behavior in three lectures, Feb. 17, Feb. 24 and March 3. The first and third lectures are already sold out, but all three will be webcast live at www.uwtv.org and available as online video on demand after that.

The Edwards lecture series brings nationally recognized psychologists to campus to co-present with UW psychology experts. All three lectures take place from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays in 210 Kane and are free to the public, though RSVPs are required and can be sent online here.

Feb. 17: The Development of Thinking About People: From Behavior to Brain, to be presented by Jessica A. Sommerville, UW associate professor of psychology, with Rebecca R. Saxe, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusets Institute of Technology. (Already filled to capacity; walk-ins will be accepted on a space-available basis.)

Feb. 24: Learning to Talk, Learning to Sing: Parallels in Humans and Songbirds, to be presented by Michael Beecher, UW professor of psychology and adjunct professor of biology; and Michael H. Goldstein, assistant professor of psychology, Cornell University.

Program notes for this lecture state, “Humans learn to talk, songbirds learn to sing. The developmental mechanisms by which they do so have been discovered to share many parallels at the neural, behavioral and social levels of organization.” Beecher and Goldstein “will discuss the role of social interaction in the learning process and illustrate the insights that can be gained by comparisons of similar processes in human and animals.”

March 3: Early adversity and the neurobehavioral development of children, to be presented by Liliana J. Lengua, UW professor of psychology, and Phil Fisher, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. (Already filled to capacity; walk-ins will be accepted on a space-available basis.)

In addition to the live webcasts, the lectures will also be broadcast on UWTV, channel 27, and available as online video on demand and for podcasting at www.uwtv.org.